Stones that did the work of men

By William Tracy

For nearly two centuries from 1096 until
1291 successive waves of European
Christians struggled to gain and maintain control
of Jerusalem and the rest of what they called the
Holy Land some 650 kilometers (400 miles) of
coastal plain and mountain spine at the eastern end
of the Mediterranean. The motives which compelled the nobles, knights and, eventually, tens of
thousands of peasants to make the arduous journey to the Holy Land often went beyond religion.
And few of those who set out on their crusades
gave any thought to the fact that the Muslims they
would face in battle like the local Christians, who
had not suffered under the status quo also called
Jerusalem holy.

From the beginning, the invaders were vastly
outnumbered, although the first wave, driven by
its passion, managed to take Jerusalem (See Aramco
World, May-June 1970). In the years that followed,
however, there never seemed to be enough knights
or foot soldiers to protect the coastal cities and the
countryside from the unending series of counterattacks from the Muslim hinterland. For all the 200
years they held on, the crusaders looked to the
West for reinforcements.

In the meantime, they built castles. Even today,
700 years after the last boatload of retreating crusaders set sail for Europe, crusader fortresses stand
forlorn guard beside harbor entrances and atop
windswept ridges in the region of Jerusalem, in
southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, and
on the island of Cyprus. Historian Robin Fedden,
co-author of Crusader Castles, wrote, "The desperate shortage of manpower encouraged every
device by which stones might do the work of
men." In the beginning castles were a defensive
refuge, "strong points from which control could be
resumed over the surrounding country when the
invader had retired. Castles were the key to the land."

For a while, the strategy worked, as two examples from the life of the great Muslim general Salah
al-Din bear witness. On one occasion, Saladin, as
he is called in the West, rode out to inspect the
defenses of a mighty crusader castle, the Krak des
Chevaliers, before attacking it.

The Krak des Chevaliers, or Castle of the
Knights, was owned and manned by knights of the
military-monastic Order of Hospitalers. It dominated a strategic pass between the Mediterranean
and the inland cities of Homs and Hama, on the
Orontes River. Called Hisn al-Akrad, or Fortress of
the Kurds, by the Arabs, it was built on the foundations of an earlier Muslim castle. Perched on a
windswept mountain spur which drops away
abruptly on three sides, the Krak was by far the
strongest of the crusader castles. T.E. Lawrence
called it "perhaps the most wholly admirable castle
in the world." Saladin examined the defenses on
the vulnerable southern side, where the Krak faced
a relatively flat plateau.

The Muslims' general inspected the triangular
outer bulwarks, its outer ditch and the stone wall
with round towers pierced by loopholes and surmounted by overhanging machicolation. Inside the
wall, he knew, was a deep, water-filled moat.
Beyond it he could see the mighty sloping talus of
carefully fitted stones 25 meters (80 feet) thick at
the base referred to by the Arabs as "The
Mountain." Lastly, he contemplated the castle's
massive rounded keep, which towered over the
entire mass and was linked to two equally impressive towers. Then, deciding that a general could
find a better use for his army than committing it to
a siege of indeterminate length and uncertain outcome, Saladin withdrew.

On the other hand, when Saladin was able to
lure the crusaders out of their near-invulnerable
castle shells to face him head-on, his forces had
them vastly outmanned. This happened in 1187, at
Hattin near the Sea of Galilee. There, on a parched
plain, when Saladin cut the crusaders off from any
source of drinking water, he outfoxed them as well.
The defeat which the crusaders suffered was irre-
versible, and crucial. Building on it, Saladin went
on to liberate Jerusalem itself just five months later.

My own first visit to the Krak des Chevaliers was
with a busload of high-school classmates from
Beirut's American Community School in 1954. We
were the only visitors on a breezy spring day.
Imagine how we boys explored the narrowest,
darkest passageways and scrambled to the highest
parapets to impress the girls. A dozen Errol Flynns
swashbuckled atop the battlements; a dozen
princesses leaned from
tower windows; cameras
clicked; chaperons held
their collective breath. Our
teenage spirits soared like
falcons that hovered on unseen
currents overhead.

Last spring, nearly 40 years after that
first visit, I journeyed again to that enchanted
castle with my wife. In the cool dimness
engineering of the vaulted entry we met a mixed
wonder. cluster of Syrians and foreigners who
made a point of greeting us. "G'dye,"
said a tall Australian in walking shorts. Yes, he was
Australian, he explained, but originally from these
very parts; now, he was a proper foreign tourist,
exploring the castle that, as a boy, he had seen only
from afar. On their tour of the Krak, he, his Syrian-
born wife and their two thoroughly Australian
children were being accompanied and feted by the
aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews of
any Syrian's extended family.

More than 50 meters (55 yards) and two sharp
turns up the inclined, cobbled passage, we walked through a
second gate and emerged into a sunny courtyard. A covey of
girls from a school in a nearby village whispered and giggled
under the watchful eyes of nuns. On the next level, the smell
of shish kebab grilling over charcoal drifted from a small
room, where a cook from a nearby village had been installed
by the Department of Antiquities to prepare a simple menu
for visiting tour groups. Next door, in a sunny hall with an
expansive view down over the castle's outer wall into the valley, a group of spry retirees from England awaited lunch
amid the echoes of a dozen conversations.

The still-modest stream of visitors drawn to the Krak des
Chevaliers from abroad has not discouraged casual visits
from the villagers whose houses cling to the steep slope
below its eastern walls. On a paved terrace at the top of a
flight of stairs we met two local women in colorful scarves
and long embroidered skirts. They chatted together and with
us as their dexterous fingers cut stalks of fennel and sprigs of
mint from the moist cracks between the stones of a shaded
wall. As we climbed higher in the castle, we found quiet
nooks and private vistas in plenty in this "most wholly
admirable castle in all the world." Author Peter Theroux has
called the Krak "the perfect storybook castle that
you have always known existed somewhere."

From the top of the keep the views to the four
points of the compass are stupendous. Eastward,
the low green hills stretch like moorlands toward
the distant desert's edge. South, beyond the castle
moat and outer wall, a few new houses of concrete
block and stucco have crept close to the edge of the
castle's outer ditch and an ancient graveyard. Thin
cypress trees in their yards grow bent by the constant wind, and beyond them, in May, the distant
peaks of Lebanon are still crowned with snow.

To the west, the hills roll toward the Mediterranean, clumps of oaks nestled in their folds,
gray-green olive groves in terraced rows upon
their slopes. Dwarfed by distance, Lego-like villages are scattered in the valleys and up the hillsides. Some are punctuated by a slender minaret,
others by the open bell tower of a church. North,
across the deep break of a stream-cut valley, the
mountain range continues. Late-season thunderheads pile high above its ominous dark ridge.
Farther north, the crusaders built other castles to
guard the mountain's westward flank. Their distant outlines are too far away to be seen, even from
the top of the crusader keep, but in the following
days we would visit two. Margat, on a triangular
hilltop, dominates the coastal plain north of Tartus;
Saone, inland east of Latakia, perches on a desolate
ridge where two rocky gorges meet as they cut
toward the sea.

Although the crusader castles were originally
conceived and built to serve as defensive retreats,
as time passed modifications in their design
allowed the knights within to use them as bases for
offensive sorties. As siege operations improved in
efficiency and the numbers of defenders continued
to dwindle, the stones were assembled in ever
more imaginative ways. As Robin Fedden wrote, it
was as though the crusaders "produced in the very
business of living, like coral, cell on cell of stone."

For the besieging Muslim forces, famine could
be an important ally, although without careful
preparation the besiegers were equally susceptible
to hunger. The attackers also called on engineering
and ingenuity to help them accomplish their task,
assembling or building an impressive range of
specialized weapons and war engines based on
two principal strategies. Simply put, these were
assault scaling the walls or battery: forcing a
way in.

Saone, in the north of Syria, is one of the many
crusader castles which fell to Salah al-Din after the
battle of Hattin. In 1188 Saladin's army brought up
before Saone six massive, catapult-like war engines two entrances.
called mangonels. They were able to hurl stone
balls weighing up to 270 kilos (600 pounds) against
its walls. When the castle finally fell, it had been in
crusader hands for almost a century, and it was
never recaptured. Today, as an example of how
history is often written by the victors, Saone is
identified on Syrian tourist maps by its subsequent
Muslim name, Saladin Castle. A small minaret
stands among several other ruined structures
inside the walls.

Saladin Castle is representative of early castle
design. All but three of its towers have a square
ground plan, rather than a more defensible round
one, and they protrude very little beyond the walls,
a fact which limits their usefulness for flanking fire.
Also, the towers, walls and even parapets are very
sparsely provided with loopholes. Nonetheless,
Saladin Castle remains an impressive fortress with
a number of remarkable features. Its narrow main
gate, situated on the sheltered side of a large rectangular-plan
tower, is a very early example of a bent entrance. Water is
stored in two rock-carved subterranean tanks, the largest of
which is spanned by a stone barrel vault more than 30 meters
long and 15 meters high (100 by 50 feet).

But the most unusual feature of Saladin Castle is its moat,
a little-known monument which deserves a place on any list
of historic engineering wonders. The fortress is a long, narrow triangle atop a rocky ridge; on the side where it touches
the mountain the crusaders hewed a deep channel, 18 meters
(60 feet) wide and nearly 140 meters (450 feet) long. The sheer
rock-cut walls of this ditch rise 27 meters (90 feet) before
touching the base of castle, and the castle's battlements tower
higher still. To create the moat, which Robin Fedden calls
"heroic, triumphantly ambitious," workers carved out a
estimated 170,000 tons of solid rock. And that rock was put to
good use, for the moat doubled as a quarry, its stones making
up the castle's walls and towers.

More extraordinary still, a rock needle thrusts up out of the
bottom of the cleft like an Egyptian obelisk. The monolith is a
part of the mountain itself, left in place by the carvers. Once a
narrow wooden bridge balanced atop this slender shaft of
solid stone, spanning the gap from a postern in the castle
walls to an exposed plateau, where in times of peace
villagers tilled their fields in the shadow of the castle.
Without the bridge, no one friend or foe could cross the
hand-hewn chasm.

Mining tunneling was another technique attackers
used to break through a castle's walls. It wouldn't have
helped at Saladin Castle, built on solid rock, but it was put to
dramatic use when the Muslims besieged Margat a century
later in 1285. Margat, with its concentric fortifications of black
stone, was the largest of all the crusader castles. Its vast cellars were habitually stocked with enough provisions to last a
thousand men over a siege of five years. When the great war
engines that Sultan Qala'un had brought up in the final siege
were destroyed by the defenders, he sent sappers below
ground to completely undermine the foundations of the circular tower-keep. But when the work was done, the sultan
was reluctant to destroy such magnificent defensive work, so
he invited a delegation of defenders to inspect the extent of
the mines. Recognizing that they were defeated, the knights
surrendered the castle and withdrew, under a promise of safe
conduct, to the port of Acre, far to the south.

The mighty Krak had fallen only a few years before. The
crusaders had held the Castle of the Knights for a century and
a half, withstanding enemy sieges on no less than 12 occasions. But while in its heyday the Krak maintained a garrison
of 2000, by the latter half of the 13th century, it and Margat
by then the only other important fortress in the area still in
crusader hands could together muster only 300
knights. In 1271, many years after Saladin's death,
the Mamluk sultan Baybars, leading an Egyptian
army and contingents from three
local rulers,
laid the last and final siege. After nearly a month of attacks
the Krak's fourth, seemingly impregnable, inner line of
defense was still holding. The stones still did their job, making up for the lack of defenders inside.

Then a letter arrived from the crusader commander at the
port of Tripoli, in today's Lebanon, advising that there was
no hope of raising reinforcements; the knights, he wrote,
should negotiate a surrender. Defeated by their meager numbers, they did so, abandoning the castle to the Muslims under
an offer of safe conduct to the coast. Only after the knights
had reached Tripoli did they discover that the letter was a
forgery. Trickery had breached the stones which force had
failed to topple in 160 years. The castle remained intact.

At the Krak, at Margat, at Saladin Castle, more than seven
centuries later, the bravest of the stones still stand, square-cut,
sun-scorched, still fit together with the fineness of a blade.
Probing roots pry other blocks fractionally apart, one season
at a time. Where stones have fallen, wild flowers and thistles
grow among them. In succeeding years the visitors who pass
this way leave as little trace as wavelets lapping against a
shore. Among the ancient stones the wind whispers of dedication, ingenuity, determination, boldness, futility and
honor. The breezes speak of the warriors who fought both
behind these mighty walls and before them: on both sides,
noble spirits. Now only the stones remain.

William Tracy, for many years assistant editor of Aramco World, is editor of corporate publications for Aramco Services Company

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